The Craziest Kind Of Contentment
by StitchAndRepair
Summary: They stumbled and faltered and fell, but they never lost. It was the two of them, with their jigsaw families poorly pieced together, against the world.


It had been years since they were sat outside the bar in the middle of winter on the hood of some car, two tired boys beaten and bloody and smiling despite it all. The Alibi was a starbucks now, a home for hipsters and writers, the smell of stale beer and body odour replaced with the rich scent of coffee and a pleasant mixture of perfumes.

It had been years since Ian's diagnosis, years since the fear and the upset that Mickey had felt so strongly in the pit of his stomach when he woke up and Ian wouldn't look at him. That terrifying thought that he had lost Ian, not even a day after he had finally got him properly, in a way he never thought he could have him. The fear was still there, curled ike a tumour somewhere beneath his ribcage, big enough that he felt it with every intake of breath, small enough that he could ignore it on the good days.

It had been years since Ian finally ate a bite of a sandwich after days of nothing at all and grabbed Mickey's wrist and pulled himself upright, out of bed and into a shower, back to somebody that Mickey recognised.

Things were different now, better, worse, the same. Depending on the day.

Mickey now recognised the person Ian became when the illness took over, recognised that it was still Ian, his Ian, just a different shade of him. Mickey had enough dark shades of his own to know that you couldn't seperate the two parts of yourself no matter how much you tried.

They both worked, whatever jobs came their way. They struggled to afford medication and the rent on their tiny apartment. Their luxuries were beer and pirated DVDS. They stole food when they couldn't afford any, they spent their savings on bail money for their brothers and birthday gifts for their sisters.

They were no longer boys, caught somewhere between the childhoods they never got to have and manhood. Past the threshhold of their twenties and a good few years from thirty.

They had survived their fathers and absent mothers, had survived homophobia and their neighborhood. They had fought through the wreckage of their past mistakes and clung to the broken bits that were left of themselves, forcing them together until they were something close to whole, intact and standing.

Their family was now built of two. Two broken homes that had merged into one, absent parents and siblings with jagged edges too sharp to fit together properly. Their family was a home made of paper walls, held together with a glue that was never quite secure. Strong winds would blow and they would sway and shake and rip and pray to every god they didn't believe in that they would make it through. Together.

Svetlana moved her girlfriend in and Mickey saw the baby most days. No longer a baby, he was in school now. He swore at the teachers in Russian, the same clipped tone as his mother, and scowled at them with the face of his father. He was smart and tough and the responsibility and tangled affection that Mickey felt for him was terrifying and brilliant.

Mickey eventually moved into the Gallagher house after Ian proved that he was staying on his meds and was doing better and wanted home. It was hard, an adjustment that took some time. The ghost of Ian's illness rattled its chains around all of them, muting conversations and forcing awkward jokes and false laughter at the dinner table. But eventually Ian's breakdown was nothing but a memory, the ghost only making a silent appearance each morning, head bowed and shoulders hunched, as Mickey or Fiona or Debbie placed Ian's tablets down in front of him.

Lip moved out of the house first, into a college dorm and then an apartment paid for by his girlfriend. Debbie went next, barely sixteen and living with her girlfriends on her own, stopping by the house when she was hungry or lonely or missing the chaos. Mickey and Ian went next, while Mandy had stayed with Fiona and Carl and Liam. Debbie moved back in two months later with a growing bump and swollen boobs and a smile that threatened to split her whole face wide open.

Mickey painted all the walls of their apartment white and stole furniture from a moving truck that someone was stupid enough to leave open and unattended . Ian brought blankets to cover the tears in the cushions of the couch from where Mickey had had to stash it in a bush til Iggy could help him carry it home. Ian brought shelves and drilled them into the walls and covered them with photos of everyone he loved, of Mandy and his brothers, of Debbie and Fiona. The biggest photo on the shelf was of a sunburnt Mickey glowering at the camera, just woken up and covered in dust and dirt, cement drying over his tattooed knuckles.

They didn't have riches or wealth, their debts sat piled high, higher every week, on a chair by the phone that had been disconnected for weeks.

They fought, they argued, they laughed until their ribs ached and their breaths turned sharp and gasping. Some nights Mickey drank until he blacked out, for no other reason except habit. Some nights memories played over in his mind that wouldn't switch off; scattered images, his fathers voice, his mothers sadness, his sisters muffled cries behind a closed bedroom door. Sometimes it took more than alcohol to clear his mind, it took weed and the scrape of his knuckles against somebody elses skin. Some nights he had dreams, nasty and terrifying, fear of falling asleep and reliving the nightmares sent him nose first into a bag of coke. He'd stay up for days, wired and ratty and Ian would stay away from home. Mickey would stay awake for so long that eventually he would crash hard enough that he dreamt of nothing. He always woke up to Ian at his side.

Some days Ian wouldn't get out of bed, sadness tied like ropes around him, locking him down. The duvet a shield, his protection from the the ugly world around him. Some days Mickey would join him, talking about nothing and holding him close.

Other days Ian pushed him away.

Some days, sometimes, turned into weeks.

Some of those weeks Mickey felt himself pulled wide open, unthreaded, exposed like a raw nerve and Ian was the reason for it, his inability to help him was the reason for it. Sometimes the silence, the house that seemed so cold and empty even though Ian was right beside him, pounded in his ears and he almost gave up, threw in the towel and rung the final bell. But Ian, everytime, would climb out of his depression with bloody nails and a haunted look in his eyes and he would find Mickey, fight past his sadness and ask Mickey to come back to bed with a voice that was dry, scratchy from days of disuse. And Mickey would never hesitate. He'd fall into the sheets that hadn't been washed for weeks and sleep soundly with Ian's arm tight around him, a rope of a different kind - no longer of sadness, but something else.

Ian may be the reason he sometimes felt ripped open, but he was also the person who stitched him back together every single time.

It was an ongoing battle, Ian's illness and Mickey's demons, and sometimes they came close to losing. But they never did. They stumbled and faltered and fell, but they never lost. It was the two of them, with their jigsaw families poorly pieced together, against the world.

They were the best and worst thing for each other, two broken boys trying to make it in a world where they could so easily drown, or crumble under the weight on their shoulders.

There were bad days and good, worse days and days where Mickey couldn't imagine things ever being any better.

They spent days and days wrapped up in each other, laughing and wrestling and marking each other with their mouths and their teeth and their had dinners with their family and complained about their sisters running up their cable bill. They kept a box of Fruit Loops in the cupboard for when his son stayed over and a box of raisin bran that Ian loved and Mickey mocked him for.

Five months and three arguments after they moved in, Mickey slotted a picture of Ian in the frame of the bathroom mirror, Ian removed it four times before he gave up and left it there. Mickey no longer felt the need to punch his own reflection, instead he smiled around a mouthful of toothpaste, gargled his mouthwash with a warmth blooming inside of his chest and ran his thumb over the curling corner of the slowly fading picture.

Ian didn't understand why he kept the photo there and Mickey never told him.

But, even on the bad days, it reminded Mickey of what he had once lost and what he would never give up on again.

It was the craziest kind of contentment, but it worked. For them, it would always work.

* * *

Thank Bukowski for the title


End file.
